"Underground Regulations" Violate the Constitution as Much as Headline-Grabbing Executive Actions

Small business owners aren’t typically lawyers, though they are undoubtedly familiar with the thousands of inscrutable pages of new regulations published every year in the Federal Register. Instead of devoting their energies to growing their businesses, owners must expend significant time and resources ensuring compliance with these voluminous and often vague regulations, with costly fines looming as consequences for failure to comply. “The Fourth Branch & Underground Regulations,” a new report by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), details the processes by which administrative agencies skirt “notice-and-comment” requirements to impose new interpretations of rules that avoid the constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, operating on this shifting field disproportionately affects small businesses, as they are most poorly equipped to lobby for favorable rules. The Administrative Procedure Act established “notice-and-comment” as a means for regulated businesses to voice concerns with or offer suggestions to improve proposed regulations. However, “non-legislative rules,” or “general statements of policy” and “interpretive rules,” are not required to undergo this process. This grants administrative agencies – the “Fourth Branch” of government – significant leeway in how “legislative rules” are interpreted and implemented, essentially giving them law making power. The recent Supreme Court ruling in Perez...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs